Sportsbook Betting on Baseball

Submitted by admin on Thu, 03/29/2007 - 14:50

Sportsbook betting and baseball, share a long and interesting past.

Baseball is widely considered the oldest of the major sports featured in the sportsbooks and the two have grown up together over the past century and a half. And although the appeal of baseball has lost some of it’s appeal in the age sportsbook bonuses and the Internet, it’s still America’s pastime and still remains popular on sportsbook sites. Sportsbook fans have seen both baseball and sportsbooks go through great changes throughout that time frame and mostly the changes have been for the better.

In the beginning baseball was a sport that took awhile to catch on, and when it did, interest in sportsbook action spiked. Up until that point the only real attraction for sportsbook bettors was boxing and some amateur football here and there. In those days boxing was king and sportsbooks were devoted almost 100% to that sport.

But with little variety and only a limited number of boxing matches sportsbooks were not all that in demand and it’s not hard to imagine some sort of sportsbook bonus existing at this time. But when professional baseball came into play around the turn of the century it added a whole other dimension for sportsbook operators.

Both took off and baseball dominated sportsbook action through the first half of the century, through such developments as WWII, integration of black players and even later on the DH. Those were heady days for baseball odds and sportsbooks and the sport reigned supreme. But both the sportsbook and baseball faced set backs in the later half of the century.

Legislation in the 1960s prohibited much of what sportsbooks could do. At about this time baseball was being passed over for other sportsbook sports like football and a budding NBA. Baseball would continue to suffer setbacks and at the end of the century faced a double whammy of a strike and steroid abuse.

But sportsbooks took off during this time as the Internet came into being and wonderful things like the sportsbook bonus began to spring up. As we enter the 21st century the sportsbook and baseball seem to be on differing trajectories.

Baseball is losing ground while the sportsbook bonus and all the other Internet extravagancies are propelling Internet betting into uncharted territories. It will be interest to see in another fifty years the relationship between these to sporting stalwarts.